Are you blind in the the data center world? You can't see and remember everything, so at times yes

If you asked an experienced data center person how many times a day they are blind to what is going on. They don't know. Why?  Because, you are asking them to see what they don't perceive, how many times you miss seeing something. 

i-Perception has a post on research done to discover the frequency of when people miss a fight.

If you don't think this research applies, then you are probably of a mindset that you have a photographic memory and can remember all kind of details.  But, it is impossible to have a perfect photographic memory.

The Truth About Photographic Memory

It's impossible to recover images with perfect accuracy. The myth of photographic memory.

By William Lee Adams, published on March 01, 2006 - last reviewed on August 07, 2008     

59-year-old Akira Haraguchi recited from memory the first 83,431 decimal places of pi, earning a spot in the Guinness World Records.

He must have a photographic memory, right? Not so. According to mounting evidence, it's impossible to recall images with near perfect accuracy.

When a professor studied Eidetic (photographic memory), he found they were not perfect.

Alan Searleman, a professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University in New York, says eidetic imagery comes closest to being photographic. When shown an unfamiliar image for 30 seconds, so-called "eidetikers" can vividly describe the image—for example, how many petals are on a flower in a garden scene. They report "seeing" the image, and their eyes appear to scan across the image as they describe it. Still, their reports sometimes contain errors, and their accuracy fades after just a few minutes. Says Searleman, "If they were truly 'photographic' in nature, you wouldn't expect any errors at all."

Now, you may think you are the exception, but consider this reason why we don't have photographic memory.  

Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability, the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the day.

And, even if you do have photographic memory, does everyone else in your data center team?

So, how many mistakes and errors in judgement are made because people are absolutely sure they saw something or sure that something did not occur, when in fact they are wrong.

Being wrong is painful, and the reality is we are blind every day.  Yet, how many systems, processes, and management decisions all make the assumption that you see everything and remember all the details. That everyone has a perfect photographic memory.

Developing Creativity for a Knowledge Economy, play more, obsess less

Being Asian I am used to the concept of Tiger Mom.  WSJ wrote an article on why Chinese Mothers are superior.  Many of you may think these are the type of people you want to have on your team, obsessed over achievers.

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

Enlarge Image

Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Luckily, my mom was not a tiger mom.  She let us play which was way more fun and creative.

Guess what one of the most successful economies in the world Singapore with a large chinese influence has the Prime Minister challenging the role of the tiger mom.  The Economist covers this topic.

ONCE upon a time most of the tiny island-state of Singapore was a jungle. That is nearly all gone now, but the country is still heavily populated by tigers. These strict, unyielding felines, celebrated by Amy Chua in her book on the superiority of Chinese parenting, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, load their cubs down with extra homework and tuition to make them excel at school. Western parents are usually horrified at the pressure the tiger mums exert on their children to get better grades or become concert violinists, preferably before puberty. But in Singapore this style of parenting, especially among the ethnic Chinese majority, is rarely questioned.

The controversial part is

Imagine, then, the surprise when the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, launched an attack on tiger mothers in a speech in late August to mark Singapore’s national day. Most of his remarks celebrated Singapore’s success, as usual. But then he berated parents for coaching their three- or four-year-old children to give them that extra edge over the five-year-old competition. And he added: “Please let your children have their childhood…Instead of growing up balanced and happy, he grows up narrow and neurotic. No homework is not a bad thing. It’s good for young children to play, and to learn through play.”

...

But the anxiety behind the comments is that hard-studying Singaporeans lack creativity and an ability to think laterally. This is now seen as a competitive disadvantage in what are often called “knowledge economies”, where innovation and inventiveness are at a premium. Are the tiger mothers, Mr Lee seems to be wondering, now putting Singapore’s future prosperity at risk?

The Knowledge Economy is the future built on top of the data centers being built now.  Would you rather have a room of anti-social over achievers or a out of the box creative innovators analyzing your data?  

Can the innovative services of the future be created by the kids who were raised by tiger mom's?  It looks like the Singapore Prime Minister has figured this out.

A Lesson from why Art is Valuable, could explain human decisions on value

It is interesting watching the really smart people make their decisions on data center design and specific pieces of equipment they choose.

I was watching a TED video of Paul Bloom discuss the origins of pleasure.  And, he had this slide up.

This statement can be used to explain the data center experts perception of value.  Here is the above quote modified.

The value of a data center power/mechanical equipment is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation. 

They have an assumption of the creation of the equipment built by humans.  They know the equipment design, and many times the specific engineers that were on the design team.  They know the past performance of the equipment.  The manufacturing and sourcing of material.  Even what service operations are like for the equipment.

The #1 thing that will cause a drop in value of the equipment is if assumptions are no longer valid.  Parts have been changed due to supply chain issues, quality has dropped due to manufacturing staff changes, designs are modified for cost reductions.  As most have learned, just because the equipment was good for you 2 years ago, it doesn't mean the latest versions are the same.

You can watch this complete video to get the full story.  The part I mention is at 11:05.

Everyone lies, do you support the fork to honest or dishonest actions?

WSJ has a post by Dan Ariely who has a new book.

The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves [Hardcover]

Dan Ariely (Author)

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I've pre-ordered the book. Why? I have read and watched Dan Ariely's works and he is on to some good issues that need to be addressed.  The human factor of lying is something few think about, but it is human nature to lie. 

Check out the WSJ article.

What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

Morales can help people take the path to honesty vs. dishonesty.

...my colleagues and I ran an experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles. We took a group of 450 participants, split them into two groups and set them loose on our usual matrix task. We asked half of them to recall the Ten Commandments and the other half to recall 10 books that they had read in high school. Among the group who recalled the 10 books, we saw the typical widespread but moderate cheating. But in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever. We reran the experiment, reminding students of their schools' honor codes instead of the Ten Commandments, and we got the same result. We even reran the experiment on a group of self-declared atheists, asking them to swear on a Bible, and got the same no-cheating results yet again.

Climate-change skeptic makes PR mistakes, loses funding

The #1 rule of any environmental group, even if it is anti-climate change is you will need to keep the money coming in.

The Economist reports on The Heartland Institute making some bad moves.

THE Heartland Institute, the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climate change, is getting a lot of heat. In recent weeks it has lost an estimated $825,000 in expected donations, a couple of directors and almost its entire branch in Washington, DC. At its annual shindig in Chicago this week, the institute’s president, Joseph Bast, said Heartland had “discovered who our real friends are.” The 100-odd guests who failed to show up for the “7th Climate Conference” were not among them.

The Heartland made a bad move.

Worse ensued early this month after the institute put up a digital billboard in Chicago that linked belief in global warming to madness and terrorism. It depicted the “Unabomber”, a mass-murderer called Ted Kaczynski, with the slogan, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” The offending sign lasted only for a day. But PepsiCo, BB&T bank and Eli Lilly, a pharma company, are among donors that announced the end of their support.

Keep in mind whenever you see an environmental group take action, they are doing the things that keeps the money coming in.  If they don't, they'll be in a defensive position like The Heartland.